Meet the Italian Socialist Who Just Might Take Down Giorgia Meloni

The Italian P.M.’s recent spat with Trump aside, she remains a right-wing figure. Global progressives should be looking to Elly Schlein.

American progressives may have felt a twinge of sympathy or even support last week for Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as she became the umpteenth target of one of Donald Trump’s churlish social media fusillades. Trump claimed she “begged” him for a photo op; she fired back that that was ridiculous.

It was amusing, but it was also a bit aberrational, because in general, the right-wing Meloni is Trump’s ideological ally. Instead, it’s the 41-year-old leader of the Italian Opposition (an official role), socialist Elly Schlein, whom progressives in the United States and elsewhere should be learning about. Schlein hopes to beat Meloni in Italian national elections, which must be held before the end of 2027.

We’re involved in a global battle between left and right, liberal democracy and populist authoritarianism. And the reality is that the global right has been much better at aligning together than the left. Steve Bannon is an architect of this, starting early in the first Trump term to organize international forces to do his bidding. With Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán felled by democratic forces in his own country, Meloni now stands as the most important right-wing leader in Europe.

The U.K. will elect a new prime minister this year. Italy will be the next big one. Meloni’s defeat in 2027, a year before the U.S. presidential elections, would send a powerful message to Republican leaders in the U.S. and to corporate interests so closely aligned with the right wing in Europe and here at home.

Schlein, who won her party’s leadership unexpectedly in 2023, is hardly the prototype of an Italian politician. A gay woman with a Jewish Ukrainian American father and an Italian mother, she was raised in Lugarno, Switzerland. She holds triple citizenship: American, Italian, and Swiss. She attended the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the world, engaging there in left-wing movement politics as she built a base of support outside the traditional party structure before surprising the old guard with her leadership victory of the Partido Democratico (Democratic Party, or P.D.) three years ago.

She began that leadership campaign 20 points behind. “When I was elected, we had just hit our historically lowest in the polls,” she said in an interview. “There were many people betting on the end of the party or a split.” Schlein says she sought to “rebuild the credibility of the party on two basic issues: the defense of the public health care system and minimum wage, and the fight against precarious jobs.”

I sat with her recently on a sweltering early summer day in the Central Rome party headquarters, where we talked for nearly two hours as she covered a range of topics with no notes. The P.D. is an amalgam of previously large parties in Italy that includes the former Communist Party of Italy, or PCI; the Socialist Party; and the Christian Democrats (the latter two are former ruling parties, while the PCI was once the largest Communist party in the Western world). Today, the P.D.........

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